04 Mar Hospital improves patient care with faster document turnaround
Digital dictation and speech recognition solutions quicken clerical processes and document turn-around time for charitable South-East medical centre.
A doctor-driven centre with charitable foundations
Founded in 1954, The Horder Centre in Crowborough was a doctor-driven charity focussing on the care of arthritis sufferers. Local gentry supported the initiative and the site soon became a popular medical centre and progressively, an elective orthopaedic centre specialising in joint replacement surgery.
With over 300 staff and 50-years’ experience, the Centre prides themselves on their superb facilities with continuous investment in facilities and technology. Identifying growing numbers of patients and administrative deadlines, the site required an efficient document turnaround process to fulfil their pledge to patient care.
Achieving medical document turnaround goals
Previously, using analogue recording and transcription products, the Centre relied on the physical handover of tape recordings to the medical secretaries. Aiming for a 48-hour turnaround, secretaries had reliability issues with the dated technology; tapes would break, the process was cumbersome and lengthy and the set-up of the day-clinic meant that recordings could not be sent for processing until the end of the working day.
To combat the requirement for multi-site connectivity and growing workloads, the Horder Centre realised they needed a simple and secure digital process and contacted local specialist, Newman Business Solutions, to recommend a solution.
Optimised digital dictation balances workloads
The site were soon using Philips SpeechMike digital solution with qualified sound quality and ergonomics – along with SpeechExec Pro – the software to store and route digital sound files between the author and transcriptionist. Additional Dragon Medical speech recognition modules were added, this meant workflow was not compromised by inter-changing working patterns or staff having to decipher unfamiliar author voices and styles.
Dean Putland, IT Network Manager for the Centre was impressed by the improved document workflow and arrangement of urgent and completed work – a stark contrast to the lack of information relating to a tape-based recording. The interface of SpeechExec Pro added welcome elements; dictation profiles – showing recording length and status, as well as visibility of priority documents.
Such features showed immediate advantages and along with optimised sound clarity and speed of routing tasks for transcription, the 48-hour turnaround measurable was successfully achieved. Medical transcriptionists were able to improve their proof-reading tasks with speech recognition assistance and further workload from extra clinics could be accommodated without the need for temporary out-sourcing.
Dean concluded: “The process is efficient; letters are dictated immediately after the patient leaves enabling a steady administrative flow to the secretaries and overall smoother and faster document processing.”
